Notes

Every presidential campaign is full of unpredictable twists and turns. After a brief moment where it looked like the nation might slouch into a Bush-Clinton rematch, the 2016 election is taking its place in that line of strange journeys. The one sure thing: There will be gaffes.

Knowing that the range of gaffes is wide, and that the import of a gaffe is often inflated (or overlooked) early on, Gaffe Track is The Atlantic’s bid to cover these gaffes with a consistent approach, creating a nearly real-time chronological inventory of the missteps, miscalculations, and misstatements of the 2016 presidential campaign.

The gaffe: Speaking to a nearly all-white crowd in rural Kenansville, North Carolina, Tuesday, Donald Trump reprised earlier statements about inner cities, with a twist. “We're going to rebuild our inner cities because our African American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they've ever been in before. Ever. Ever. Ever," he said. “You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street. They're worse—I mean, honestly, places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities. And I think it's resonating.” As many people with a basic understanding of American history pointed out, this overlooks a couple other periods, including segregation, violent vote suppression, and the lifetime enslavement of millions of people forcibly brought to the U.S.

The defense: Trump is almost certainly not speaking literally here; he’s just trying to make the case that black voters should not continue to support the Democratic Party.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): Trump continues to say he’s courting black voters, and while his numbers have risen somewhat—from historically bad levels for a modern Republican—national polls suggest they’re still not especially strong. This comment is mostly pointlessly dumb hyperbole, though many African Americans understandably took unkindly to Trump’s previous suggestions that black communities are uniformly inner-city dens of violence and ignorance.

The lesson: Don’t take history lessons from a man who can’t even remember the day of the September 11 attacks correctly.

The gaffe: Speaking on September 16, Trump criticized Hillary Clinton for her support for gun control. (His premise, that Clinton wants to repeal the Second Amendment, is of course untrue.) “I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons,” the Republican nominee said. “I think they should disarm. Immediately. Let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away, O.K. It’ll be very dangerous.”

The defense: The Trump campaign isn’t really bothering to defend the comment.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): What’s truly remarkable about this comment is not the political gamesmanship; everyone does that. This statement is notable because just last month Trump was making jokes about how Second Amendment backers could potentially assassinate Clinton. It’s a neat trick: First, plant suggestions for your opponent to be killed; then call for her to drop her security detail. This, like many other Trump comments, would have been disqualifying for any other candidate.

The lesson: Don’t shoot yourself in the foot with assassination jokes.

The gaffe: Speaking at a fundraiser on September 9, Clinton said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

The defense: The short version, as articulated more fully by my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, is that Clinton was factually correct. She partially walked back her statement, saying, “Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that's never a good idea,” but also sticking by her basic point: “It's deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices, including by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading their message to 11 million people. It's deplorable that he's attacked a federal judge for his ‘Mexican heritage,’ bullied a Gold Star family because of their Muslim faith, and promoted the lie that our first black president is not a true American.”

Why it matters (or doesn’t): It’s never a good idea to publicly write off a quarter of the electorate as “deplorable,” even if they’re voters that Clinton was never in a million years going to win. This comment is already shaping up to be one of those defining gaffes of a campaign—the narrative-making soundbites that are remembered for years to come, like Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe or Barack Obama’s bitter-clingers moment. The silver lining for Clinton is that those comments rarely make much difference, as I explored here. Also, as Greg Sargent notes, most Americans say they agree that Trump and his campaign are prejudiced.

The lesson: If you describe your opponents as hell in a handbasket, that's where your own prospects might end up.

The candidate: Gary Johnson, making his debut here two days after Jill Stein. Welcome!

The gaffe: On Morning Joe on Thursday, Mike Barnicle asked the Libertarian nominee what he’d do about the Syrian city of Aleppo if nominated. His answer was pretty atrocious:

“And what is Aleppo?” Once informed that it was a city in Syria, he offered a somewhat meandering canned answer on Syria, though he didn’t really say what he’d do there.

The defense: Johnson says he’s “incredibly frustrated with himself,” and basically acknowledged he didn’t know the city. To his credit, when Mark Halperin asked if it should “be a big flap,” Johnson replied, “Well, sure it should!”

Why it matters (or doesn’t): Johnson and the Libertarian Party have a golden chance this year—Donald Trump is widely reviled by many conservatives, and he’s especially weak on foreign policy, where he’s shown next to no real knowledge. But Johnson keeps squandering opportunities to show disaffected Republicans and conservatives he’s a good alternative—on DACA, on religious freedom, and now on Syria. There’s a reason Johnson seems to have hit a ceiling at less than 10 percent in the polls—well short of the 15 percent he needs to qualify for the presidential debates.

The lesson: A presidential hopeful shouldn’t have to Raqqa his brain or have a Road to Damascus moment to remember the biggest city in Syria.

The candidate: Jill Stein, making her first appearance in this space. Welcome, doctor!

The gaffe: The Green Party candidate was headed to Ohio last week for a rally at Capital University. As you may know, that’s in suburban Columbus. As it turns out, Stein’s team did not, which is why they had her fly into Cincinnati, an almost-two-hour drive away. Her speech had to be delayed while the candidate drove in, as The Columbus Dispatch’s Randy Ludlow reported.

The defense: “This is what happens when people don't have private travel agents and private jets at their disposal. These are the issues that every day people face when they travel,” Stein’s press secretary wrote me in an email. That’s a pretty good line except, um, is it really true that everyday people fly into the wrong city regularly?

Why it matters (or doesn’t): This is really just a funny-haha sort of gaffe—entertaining but with no policy implications. However, an insurgent campaign like Stein’s doesn’t have much margin for error, and she’s already been hurt by peculiar comments made by her running mate and for that matter herself. There are a lot of things you can’t control in politics, but airline tickets are usually one.

The lesson: Flying economy is no excuse for being late to criticize the economy.

The gaffe: On Wednesday, the Republican nominee traveled to Mexico City to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. At a press conference, the men were asked if they’d discussed Trump’s promise to make Mexico pay for a border wall. “Who pays for the wall? We didn’t discuss it,” Trump said. (Listen for yourself here.) Later, Peña Nieto issued a statement claiming he had ruled it out. Then Trump’s campaign issued a statement that didn’t dispute that. Then on Thursday, on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, Trump claimed he had said that they did discuss it:

The gaffe: Jake Anantha is an 18-year-old Charlotte, North Carolina, man who is half-Indian and was, until Thursday night, a fervent Trump supporter looking forward to casting his first vote for president for the Republican. But when he went to Trump’s rally in Charlotte, he was ejected—he believes because of the color of his skin. “I told him I've never been to another rally in my life. I’m a huge Trump supporter. I would never protest against Trump,” he told CNN. “I do think it’s because I’m brown.”

The defense: Security told Anantha that he looked just like a man who’d caused trouble at previous ralli...—wait, no, that doesn’t actually make it any better.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): On a basic level, it’s not a good idea to alienate your supporters, especially when you’re already down by several points in the polls. (Anantha now says he’ll perhaps vote for Gary Johnson.) The incident offers ammunition to anyone who thinks the Trump campaign is driven by racial resentment and dislike of minorities. On the plus side, Trump doesn’t really have enough minority supporters for this to make a dent.

The lesson: If you support candidates who back racial profiling, you might get racially profiled at their rallies.

The gaffe: Who’s that standing behind the Democratic nominee during a rally in Kissimmee, Florida? Oh, just Seddique Mateen, the father of Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen and a man who has espoused pro-Taliban and anti-gay views, in addition to peculiar statements suggesting he holds some power in Afghanistan.

The defense: In a statement to WPTV, the Clinton campaign said, “The rally was a 3,000-person, open-door event for the public. This individual wasn't invited as a guest and the campaign was unaware of his attendance until after the event.” (Mateen also said he had just decided to go.)

Why it matters (or doesn’t): This isn’t a major gaffe by the candidate, but it’s sort of baffling. Sure, events are open to the public, but how did staffers allow their boss to get in a situation where she was standing in front of Mateen, sitting somewhat prominently in the grandstand? He’s not the name you want in headlines with Hillary Clinton. Perhaps Trump was right: “We have no idea where they come from, we have no idea who the hell they are. We know they believe in certain things that we don’t want to believe in.”

The gaffe: On Wednesday, the Republican nominee talked about watching a video of American officials unloading cash in Iran. The cash was real—a Wall Street Journal scoop revealed it—but there was no video. Trump’s spokeswoman admitted that to The Washington Post, saying he was referring to a different video. And yet on Thursday, Trump once again claimed to have watched the video. “I woke up yesterday and I saw $400 million—different currencies, they probably don’t want our currency—being flown to Iran,” he said in Maine on Thursday. “You know it was interesting, because a tape was made, with the airplane coming in, nice airplane, and the money coming off I guess. That was given to us, has to be, by the Iranians. You know why the tape was given to us? Because they want to embarrass our country.”

The defense: The first time Trump made the claim, it was plausible he was just confused. But now?

Why it matters (or doesn’t): There are two possibilities, neither especially flattering. One is that the campaign knows Trump is mistaken, but no one bothered to tell the candidate, leaving him to make a public gaffe. Another is that Trump knows quite well and doesn’t care. It takes a special sort of brazenness, and a certain kind of faith in one’s base, and probably a certain sort of delusion about how politics works, to assume that you can get away with lying about this. It’s not the first time Trump has claimed to have seen a video that didn’t exist—like when he described tape of Muslims supposedly celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey. So maybe Trump really does believe he saw the tape. Which isn’t a good sign either.

The gaffe: Speaking in Omaha on Tuesday, the Democrat said, “Trump wants to cut taxes for the super rich,” she said, to boos. “Well, we’re not going there, my friends. I’m telling you right now, we’re going to write fairer rules for the middle class and we”—here’s where things get interesting. Some people heard what she said as “are going to raise taxes for the middle class.” But on a closer listen, she’s clearly saying “aren’t.”

The defense: Even if Clinton had said “are,” it would be a clear slip of the tongue, not a declaration of policy. Clinton has promised not to raised taxes on anyone making up to $250,000—significantly higher than most reasonable definitions of the middle class, although anti-tax groups argue she’d do so anyway through backdoor methods.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): Some conservatives will take this as a Kinsley gaffe, the classic variety in which a candidate accidentally tells the truth, but substantively, there’s not much here. Not since Fritz Mondale has a Democratic candidate been willing to say he or she will raise taxes on the middle class, and Mondale got shellacked. Clinton’s not about to emulate him.

The gaffe: Speaking to Fox News’ Chris Wallace on July 30, Clinton said of her email scandal, “[FBI] Director [James] Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.” Except as The Washington Post explains, that’s not what he said at all. While Comey said Clinton had not lied to the FBI and recommended against charging her, he was also clear that she had emailed classified material.

The defense: Clinton is right that Comey deemed her not to have lied to the FBI, at least.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): As my colleague Ron Fournier writes, Clinton’s insistence on continuing to lie about what Comey said is puzzling. Even as she has apologized for using the server and escaped indictment, she apparently can’t bring herself to simply eat crow and move on, and instead misstates easily available facts. For a candidate already facing serious trust issues with much of the electorate, that seems unwise. Luckily for her, Trump has decided to launch a feud with Gold Star parents, propose appeasing Putin, and say the election is rigged, distracting a great deal of attention.

The lesson: Keep it straight and the election could be signed, sealed, and delivered to Clinton. Otherwise, the fact-check is in the email.

The gaffe:USA Today’s Kirsten Powers asked Trump about the allegations of sexual harassment that toppled Fox News honcho Roger Ailes. When Trump downplayed them, she asked how he’d feel if his daughter was harassed. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” he said. Tuesday morning, Trump’s son Eric tried to clean it up. While saying harassment should be reported and dealt with, he added, “I don’t think she would allow herself to be subjected to that.”

The defense: The Republican has said he “would be the best for women” and that “Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!”

Why it matters (or doesn’t): As Powers notes, Trump’s answer falls short for several reasons. It overlooks the fact that not all women can easily just leave a job. Moreover, it pushes the illegality of harassment off to the side, while placing the burden to rectify the situation on victims of sexual harassment. Eric Trump’s answer, meanwhile, implies that victims of harassment are somehow not “strong.” These sorts of statements matter because they’re liable to alienate women, a group with which Trump already trails badly—57-43 in a recent CNN poll; his unfavorable rating with women is even worse.

The lesson: Don’t blame the victim, especially if the victim is a voter.

As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.

We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose’s collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.

“You want pictures before we start?” Debow asked me. He’s the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he “fell in love with the science.” His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. “Jake Debow,” Josh told me, “is about as Vermont as you can get.” It was Debow’s second season on the moose project, and Blouin’s first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they’d found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.

The Bulwark is on a mission to name and shame President Trump’s most high-status supporters.

Charlie Sykes is sitting behind a desk in a sparse, disheveled office—blank walls lined with empty filing cabinets, windows covered with crooked blinds—as he tries to conjure the perfect metaphor for The Bulwark, the anti–Donald Trump conservative news site he recently helped start.

“We are the ultimate wilderness!” he declares to me.

But that doesn’t sound quite lonely enough for the political niche they’re occupying, so he tries again: “We’re on a desert island.”

Sykes continues to riff like this in his chirpy, midwestern accent, comparing The Bulwark’s writers to a band of “Somali pirates,” and then to a contingent of “guerrilla fighters.” He’s so enthusiastic about the exercise that before long I am tossing out my own overwrought suggestions. Perhaps, I muse at one point, they are soldiers on the final front of the Republican Civil War—making one last stand before the forces of Trumpism complete their conquest.

“Intuitive eating” encourages people to eat whatever they want. It might be great advice.

In 2016, Molly Bahr changed her whole life with a Google search. Bahr, a therapist, was at a professional training on eating disorders when a speaker mentioned in passing that participants might be interested in something called intuitive eating. Bahr looked up the term. “I went home that day, and it was like a light switch,” she says. “I felt like I got hit by a truck.”

Bahr decided she wanted to spread the word about intuitive eating, but there was one problem. Up to that moment, she had been dedicated to traditional ideas of dieting and health, encouraging followers on her growing fitness-focused Instagram account to weigh their food, watch their nutritional macros, and fret over their weight as a primary indicator of their health. Intuitive eating, on the other hand, is a theory that posits the opposite: Calorie-counting, carb-avoiding, and waistline-measuring are not only making people emotionally miserable, but contributing to many of the health problems previously attributed to simple over-eating.

For several months, Cara has been working up the courage to approach her mom about what she saw on Instagram. Not long ago, the 11-year-old—who, like all the other kids in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym—discovered that her mom had been posting photos of her, without prior approval, for much of her life. “I’ve wanted to bring it up. It’s weird seeing myself up there, and sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself,” she said.

Like most other modern kids, Cara grew up immersed in social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all founded before she was born; Instagram has been around since she was a toddler. While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since birth. The shock of realizing that details about your life—or, in some cases, an entire narrative of it—have been shared online without your consent or knowledge has become a pivotal experience in the lives of many young teens and tweens.

A significant minority seldom or never meet people from another race, and they prize sameness, not difference.

Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.

Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.

Though it was clear long before this week’s hearings that there was serious fraud in the Ninth District, testimony produced a series of astonishing disclosures.

The decision came after a dramatic day, during a dramatic hearing, in a dramatic race. North Carolina election officials on Thursday ordered a new election in the state’s fraud-tainted Ninth Congressional District, the only 2018 U.S. House race that still doesn’t have a winner.

The contest between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready appeared to have been decided, albeit by a small margin, in Harris’s favor on election night. Now voters will remain without congressional representation until a new election can be held, following shocking revelations of a brazen scheme to break the law and swing the election using absentee ballots.

The hearing, originally scheduled to last one day, was well into its fourth when Harris abruptly called for a new election. “Through the testimony I’ve listened to over the past three days I believe a new election should be called,” he said. “It has become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the Ninth-District seat general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.”

I was one of many people who found Jussie Smollett’s story a little off from the beginning. Two white men in ski masks are out in 10-degree weather in the middle of the night, equipped with a bottle of bleach or something like it and a rope that they fashioned into a mock noose. These thugs, who shouted Trump slogans as well as racist and homophobic slurs, seemed to know who Smollett was on sight, meaning they were aficionados of the splashy black soap opera Empire, on which Smollett is a main character. Somehow they were aware that Smollett, prominent but hardly on the A-list as celebrities go, was gay.

Yes, my skepticism made me feel a little guilty. We are justly sensitized to violence against people for being black and for being gay in the wake of incidents I need not name. We are also just past watching legions of people who should have known better refuse to credit Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe fear and trauma distorted Smollett’s memory somewhat? Maybe the media were getting some of the details wrong? Wait and see, I and others thought.

The failed attempt to bring Amazon’s second headquarters to New York was a debacle, exposing a rift among progressives so large that it occupied half of last Sunday’s Meet the Press broadcast. When a local economic-development deal garners that kind of national press attention—when the head of the DNC is grilled about it by Chuck Todd—it is clear that this is about much more than local tax policy and a helipad.

I offered conditional support for Amazon’s arrival in New York when the deal was announced in November, while acknowledging the need to fix the deal’s problems. I was immediately labeled by the denizens of Twitter “a corporate shill,” “paid by Bezos,” or, my personal favorite, “a writer from Breitbart.” So convinced are some of my fellow progressives of their own rectitude, that they offer no more room for dissent than the modern GOP.

Can Roma nab Best Picture? Will A Star Is Born be snubbed? Here are The Atlantic’s predictions for the 91st Academy Awards.

However dramatic Sunday’s Academy Awards presentation might prove to be (safe prediction: not very), it will be all but impossible for the ceremony to match the turmoil of its run-up. Last summer, the Academy announced that it would add a new prize for “popular” film—a trulyterrible idea—only to reverse itself within a month. In December, days after being announced as the host, Kevin Hart stepped down after furor erupted over a series of nearly decade-old homophobic tweets and jokes. (Prepare yourselves: The last time the ceremony went without a host, in 1989, is widely considered the worst Oscars ever.) Then word came out that, to streamline the broadcast, the Academy would feature renditions of only two of the nominees for Best Original Song, and would present some significant technical awards, including Best Cinematography, during commercial breaks. Both plans were also quickly reversed.

Long ago, it could have required the president to meet certain requirements priorto unlocking this broad authority.

Who empowered President Donald Trump to declare that “a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States”? Congress. Congress authorized such sweeping authority. Congress failed to impose meaningful constraints or define “national emergency.” Congress is failing to maintain accountability by abiding by its six-month mandatory reviews of such emergencies. And it is Congress that has the power to terminate Trump’s proclamation by a joint resolution of both chambers of Congress. According to recent reports, the House is going to introduce a joint resolution to do just that on Friday. The Senate would need to sign on. But since the president can veto this joint resolution, both chambers will need a two-thirds majority—an unlikely scenario in this political climate.

As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.

We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose’s collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.

“You want pictures before we start?” Debow asked me. He’s the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he “fell in love with the science.” His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. “Jake Debow,” Josh told me, “is about as Vermont as you can get.” It was Debow’s second season on the moose project, and Blouin’s first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they’d found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.

The Bulwark is on a mission to name and shame President Trump’s most high-status supporters.

Charlie Sykes is sitting behind a desk in a sparse, disheveled office—blank walls lined with empty filing cabinets, windows covered with crooked blinds—as he tries to conjure the perfect metaphor for The Bulwark, the anti–Donald Trump conservative news site he recently helped start.

“We are the ultimate wilderness!” he declares to me.

But that doesn’t sound quite lonely enough for the political niche they’re occupying, so he tries again: “We’re on a desert island.”

Sykes continues to riff like this in his chirpy, midwestern accent, comparing The Bulwark’s writers to a band of “Somali pirates,” and then to a contingent of “guerrilla fighters.” He’s so enthusiastic about the exercise that before long I am tossing out my own overwrought suggestions. Perhaps, I muse at one point, they are soldiers on the final front of the Republican Civil War—making one last stand before the forces of Trumpism complete their conquest.

“Intuitive eating” encourages people to eat whatever they want. It might be great advice.

In 2016, Molly Bahr changed her whole life with a Google search. Bahr, a therapist, was at a professional training on eating disorders when a speaker mentioned in passing that participants might be interested in something called intuitive eating. Bahr looked up the term. “I went home that day, and it was like a light switch,” she says. “I felt like I got hit by a truck.”

Bahr decided she wanted to spread the word about intuitive eating, but there was one problem. Up to that moment, she had been dedicated to traditional ideas of dieting and health, encouraging followers on her growing fitness-focused Instagram account to weigh their food, watch their nutritional macros, and fret over their weight as a primary indicator of their health. Intuitive eating, on the other hand, is a theory that posits the opposite: Calorie-counting, carb-avoiding, and waistline-measuring are not only making people emotionally miserable, but contributing to many of the health problems previously attributed to simple over-eating.

For several months, Cara has been working up the courage to approach her mom about what she saw on Instagram. Not long ago, the 11-year-old—who, like all the other kids in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym—discovered that her mom had been posting photos of her, without prior approval, for much of her life. “I’ve wanted to bring it up. It’s weird seeing myself up there, and sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself,” she said.

Like most other modern kids, Cara grew up immersed in social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all founded before she was born; Instagram has been around since she was a toddler. While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since birth. The shock of realizing that details about your life—or, in some cases, an entire narrative of it—have been shared online without your consent or knowledge has become a pivotal experience in the lives of many young teens and tweens.

A significant minority seldom or never meet people from another race, and they prize sameness, not difference.

Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.

Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.

Though it was clear long before this week’s hearings that there was serious fraud in the Ninth District, testimony produced a series of astonishing disclosures.

The decision came after a dramatic day, during a dramatic hearing, in a dramatic race. North Carolina election officials on Thursday ordered a new election in the state’s fraud-tainted Ninth Congressional District, the only 2018 U.S. House race that still doesn’t have a winner.

The contest between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready appeared to have been decided, albeit by a small margin, in Harris’s favor on election night. Now voters will remain without congressional representation until a new election can be held, following shocking revelations of a brazen scheme to break the law and swing the election using absentee ballots.

The hearing, originally scheduled to last one day, was well into its fourth when Harris abruptly called for a new election. “Through the testimony I’ve listened to over the past three days I believe a new election should be called,” he said. “It has become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the Ninth-District seat general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.”

I was one of many people who found Jussie Smollett’s story a little off from the beginning. Two white men in ski masks are out in 10-degree weather in the middle of the night, equipped with a bottle of bleach or something like it and a rope that they fashioned into a mock noose. These thugs, who shouted Trump slogans as well as racist and homophobic slurs, seemed to know who Smollett was on sight, meaning they were aficionados of the splashy black soap opera Empire, on which Smollett is a main character. Somehow they were aware that Smollett, prominent but hardly on the A-list as celebrities go, was gay.

Yes, my skepticism made me feel a little guilty. We are justly sensitized to violence against people for being black and for being gay in the wake of incidents I need not name. We are also just past watching legions of people who should have known better refuse to credit Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe fear and trauma distorted Smollett’s memory somewhat? Maybe the media were getting some of the details wrong? Wait and see, I and others thought.

The failed attempt to bring Amazon’s second headquarters to New York was a debacle, exposing a rift among progressives so large that it occupied half of last Sunday’s Meet the Press broadcast. When a local economic-development deal garners that kind of national press attention—when the head of the DNC is grilled about it by Chuck Todd—it is clear that this is about much more than local tax policy and a helipad.

I offered conditional support for Amazon’s arrival in New York when the deal was announced in November, while acknowledging the need to fix the deal’s problems. I was immediately labeled by the denizens of Twitter “a corporate shill,” “paid by Bezos,” or, my personal favorite, “a writer from Breitbart.” So convinced are some of my fellow progressives of their own rectitude, that they offer no more room for dissent than the modern GOP.

Can Roma nab Best Picture? Will A Star Is Born be snubbed? Here are The Atlantic’s predictions for the 91st Academy Awards.

However dramatic Sunday’s Academy Awards presentation might prove to be (safe prediction: not very), it will be all but impossible for the ceremony to match the turmoil of its run-up. Last summer, the Academy announced that it would add a new prize for “popular” film—a trulyterrible idea—only to reverse itself within a month. In December, days after being announced as the host, Kevin Hart stepped down after furor erupted over a series of nearly decade-old homophobic tweets and jokes. (Prepare yourselves: The last time the ceremony went without a host, in 1989, is widely considered the worst Oscars ever.) Then word came out that, to streamline the broadcast, the Academy would feature renditions of only two of the nominees for Best Original Song, and would present some significant technical awards, including Best Cinematography, during commercial breaks. Both plans were also quickly reversed.

Long ago, it could have required the president to meet certain requirements priorto unlocking this broad authority.

Who empowered President Donald Trump to declare that “a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States”? Congress. Congress authorized such sweeping authority. Congress failed to impose meaningful constraints or define “national emergency.” Congress is failing to maintain accountability by abiding by its six-month mandatory reviews of such emergencies. And it is Congress that has the power to terminate Trump’s proclamation by a joint resolution of both chambers of Congress. According to recent reports, the House is going to introduce a joint resolution to do just that on Friday. The Senate would need to sign on. But since the president can veto this joint resolution, both chambers will need a two-thirds majority—an unlikely scenario in this political climate.